Test cricket's final fling?

Ricky Ponting sweeps Anil Kumble on the way to his century. Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images

Ricky Ponting's professional catharsis during the first innings of the ongoing Australia v India Test match in Bangalore arrived in stages. Some moments stood out. With his score on 68, and having recently passed his highest Test score in India, Ponting faced a fresh over from Harbhajan Singh, the bowler who has tormented him on these trips. The sixth ball was Harbahjan's variation: flatter and zipping away off the pitch. Ponting planted his pad in line with off stump and let it go. He looked up with wide eyes. Harbahjan just stared. Even watching on television, you felt it: this was one of the game's more poignant dot balls.

The kind of delivery that, during his miserable series of 2001, might have had Ponting cartwheeling into his own stumps had been simply dealt with. Seven years in the making, it was a lovely moment. This was sport in its pure form: a vertiginous confrontation of technique, skill and character. It was a Test cricket kind of moment, too: gently, incrementally constructed, dizzyingly subtle. And it was a pretty good leave.

Right now it's tempting to hoard moments like these. You guzzle them greedily, with a sense that there might actually be a limit on how much of this there is still to come. More than most sports, Test cricket has always had an air of the protected species about it: heritage-stamped, regally ossified and continually under threat from the deeply worrying forces of the new. As far as Test cricket goes, the world has been ending for some time now. Still, you do wonder occasionally. And if excitement about the current series in India has a slightly fevered edge to it, this might be with good reason.

The most commonly mooted murder weapon in the premature demise of Test cricket has been the one-day game. Concern has surrounded the enduring appetite of the watching public for the more attritional charms of the longer form. So far so good. Test cricket has hung in there. The last few years have brought the fresh challenge of Twenty20. With it comes a threat to something more fundamental, even, than spectators. This time it's the players.

The start of a potentially thrilling Test series in India seems like a good moment to reflect on this. Already it seems that Twenty20, through the IPL and assorted kindred tournaments, is closer to a separate form of the game. It is both aggressive and expansionist. It doesn't need Test cricket. It doesn't need the longer form at all. And intentionally or not, it's going some way towards persuading the people who play the game that they don't either.

Battle has already been joined on this front. The prize money for winning next year's County championship has been raised to £500,000. Which is still £50,000 less than England's players can earn in a single Twenty20 match next month. Elsewhere players of the calibre of Loots Bosman and Dilhara Fernando have been guaranteed earnings of $450,000 over three years by their employers in the IPL, a competition that lasts just 44 days.

There are some serious career choices to be made here, and it would be impossibly naïve to imagine these kind of forces will fail to exert a violent gravitational pull. As usual Test cricket looks most vulnerable. The standard line is still that Test matches remain the pinnacle of the playing calendar. To date, no international player has broken ranks on this, at least not overtly.

Which brings us back to the current series. The last time these two teams played, Andrew Symonds was Australia's equal top run scorer. Symonds isn't in India now. He might be back, he might not. He will, however continue to earn $1.47m playing for Hyderabad in the IPL. Symonds hasn't retired from playing Test cricket to concentrate on the shorter, much more lucrative game (in fact the IPL's co-founder Lalit Modi has urged him not to). It just looks a bit like that.

What is certain is that Test cricket is weakened by his absence. As it is by the absence of 13 Bangladeshi cricketers now banned from playing for their country due to ICL commitments. The notion of a weakened Bangladesh Test team might sound like something of a tautology – even a philosophical impossibility – but this is still a serious blow. A lot of effort has been poured into nurturing Test cricket's most recent full member. A significant amount has been undone by the lure of a second rate sub-continental Twenty20 beano.

Which brings us back again to the current series. Both India and Australia are, we're told, in transition. India's epic middle order is in the process of being dismantled: Sourav Ganguly has already announced he will retire after the Australia series. This has been a great Test batting line-up. Who knows, we may never see a middle order like it again.

Partly because there seems little doubt that many young, talented cricketers are already spending their time developing techniques other than the expert leave or the 12-over spell of probing line and length. The fast hands and unorthodox feet movement that permit the hoiked six off a full ball; the unerring medium-pace yorker: these are some seriously lucrative skills.

And if young cricketers aren't focusing their ambitions, at least partially, on the financial rewards of Twenty20, you feel like asking: why not? It seems illogical not to. Sir Allen Stanford has already spoken about setting up two youth academies in the West Indies, one for the first class game; another for Twenty20 and one-day skills. It's an idea others may follow. If you were 13 years old which one would you like to be packed off to?

Which brings us back, again, to the current series. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is keeping wicket for India in Bangalore. Dhoni is world cricket's biggest star right now. To the blinkered, Test-centric eye, this might seem anomalous. Dhoni is a good wicket-keeper. His Test batting average is decent: better than Mark Boucher, worse than Matt Prior (both have one Test hundred). But in the one-day game Dhoni's skills are remarkable, his presence thrilling. Dhoni doesn't really need Test Matches. And he's cricket's biggest star - as well as its most charismatic role model.

It's sometimes easy to adopt the position that any kind of change is change for the worse. And Test cricket has been through choppy waters before. Australia and India were also playing each other 19 years ago when the first of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket Super Test series was being staged. At the time the Guardian warned that the Australian board was "faced with declining profits and shattered morale among its players". One headline warned: "cricket itself lies bleeding". Before the first Packer Test our correspondent wrote of wickets being "readied for the funeral of cricket as we know it". Henry Blofeld, no less, opined that: "the traditional cricket world has already been shattered".

And so it had, although Test cricket did survive and even flourished. In fact, one of the positive effects of that particular upheaval was the forcible blooding of a generation of new talent. England's depleted tour of Pakistan saw fresh faces Mike Brearley, Mike Gatting, Ian Botham and Paul Downton in the front rank. For Pakistan the young Javed Miandad was recalled, a player who would, in his time, become Pakistan's greatest Test batsman.

Which brings us back, finally, to the current series in India. These are undeniably exciting times in the ICC's cyclical Test match itinerary. India play Pakistan next. Australia will soon play South Africa home and away. And then there's next summer's Ashes series in England. Test cricket has no greater riches than these. Ponting's triumphant first day in Bangalore signalled the start of what is effectively an uninterrupted 11-month global march-past by the five-day game. Enjoy it while you can. Go on, gorge yourself. After all, it's not totally clear - not yet anyway - what might be coming along next.

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